Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody surprising new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when top leaders were secretly conserving a personal list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the circumstances referred to within the report have been thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with defending the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just one month after he accomplished his two-year tenure as president of the conference. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl however acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the details around lots of the tales they've already shared, but many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by way of and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vp and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally consists of private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to help church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “quick motion to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to present extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” mentioned Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to data of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine the Govt Committee was not doing the “will of the messengers,” or following the lead of lay leaders who had already voted in favor of doing so. It additionally led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who instructed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings in a number of states, has long advocated a churchwide database and was met with hostility. The report states that when she met with SBC leaders in 2007, a member of the Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to try to make one thing happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit companion for their own determination to choose institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other churches. In contrast to the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical construction.

In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local church buildings” however that they'd try to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not immediately return a request for remark.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist task power on the difficulty and stated that the report reveals a need for institutions like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar approach to how Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union when he detailed Joseph Stalin’s crimes in a speech in 1956.

“The depths of wickedness and inhumanity in this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous two decades combating for reform.